Napier News » Media Research

EE Times finds engineers don’t like Twitter

Mike — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:18:00 +0000

The EE Times declaration that “Engineers don’t like Twitter” was interesting – the results mirror some of the conclusions from our own survey of social media habits of European engineers. We also found that superficial social networking simply wasn’t important to engineers, who preferred the more task-orientated social interaction offered by forums.

It’s interesting that, despite the amount of effort being put into developing new social media tools, engineers’ online habits haven’t changed much. As an FAE 15 years ago, one of my jobs was supporting customers through internet newsgroups. Although these newsgroups have generally been replaced by forums managed by vendors, the social media interaction that gets engineers the results they need has barely changed in the last one and a half decades.

Print is only half-dead

Mike — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:53:57 +0000

A long time ago, when print still ruled the roost and online advertising brought in a pretty small proportion of a publisher’s revenue, Napier started looking at the page counts of magazines. With the current economic downturn and the move to online I thought it would be worth sharing some of the findings of this ongoing research.
We didn’t have time to track the total page count of every magazine, so created our own magazine page stock market – the Napier Page Index (NPI). This index includes 18 electronics magazines published across Europe, and we simply track the page count per issue of those magazines, with the page count of January 2001 providing an index base of 100. This was set when times were still pretty good: the last recession didn’t really hit page counts until January 2002. If a magazine closes, we replace it with the nearest equivalent.
Given the general feeling of gloom perhaps surprisingly the page count index is still at 53 – only 47% down on 2001 and only 22% down on March 2004. Of course there have been some closures and some titles have cut frequency, but I think this is a surprisingly good result. Having said that half the pages means [roughly] half the print revenue: with the increase in printing and postage costs, this is a very significant fall in income.
Perhaps surprisingly design books have performed the worst, now delivering less than half the number of pages they were eight years ago. News-orientated titles don’t do much better, and some of these have cut frequency significantly. The most surprising result was that product books are delivering more pages per issue than 2001: I can only think that this is influenced by a smaller sample size and the fact that they face little competition from other product books.
Not surprisingly the pan-European titles have suffered the least damage, presumably as smaller budgets drive advertisers to pull out of local-language titles. Germany has seen the biggest fall in page counts, dropping a scary 61%, and no longer has the highest average page count – an accolade that now goes to Italy. This has to be due to the overcrowded market: there are more titles in Germany than any other country.
Overall, however, I was surprised that the page counts of magazines hasn’t collapsed further – most people seem to believe that page counts are one third or one quarter of what they were in 2001. Despite the advent of the Internet, page counts are only 25 to 30% down on 2002 – the last downturn in the electronics market.
Clearly in the long term magazines must do something different to survive. We’ve seen EE Times use digital distribution for a significant proportion of the circulation and other magazines – such as Electronics appear to be doing the same. If digital versions can woo back advertisers who made cuts in the recession then magazines have a future, although I’m sure that this will require more accountability, tracking and measurable ROI: all things that digital magazines have the potential to provide.
For more information on the research, send me an email.

Digital magazine open rates revealed

Mike — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:04:26 +0000

I recently emailed a number of publishers asking for information on open rates for their digital versions. Typically this information is kept pretty quiet, with the notable exception of TechInsights, who publish their data monthly – well done guys! With open rates much more accurately measurable than for print titles, I’m guessing some publishers are worried that the number of unopened copies will be viewed as “bad”.

So I asked several publishers about unique open rates, and got responses from ED Europe, EPN, EPN France, and all of TechInsight’s European publications. I didn’t get a response from some titles, with ICC Media and Reed UK (Electronics Weekly) the two big publishers that offered no stats. To be fair I only sent one email, so don’t read too much into their lack of response.

The results were very interesting:

four titles had open rates of 11-12%
one title had an open rate of 16%
one title had an open rate of 19%

I tried to find some cause of the difference in open rate, but there was no link between circulation, publication frequency or publisher and the open rate.

So what does this mean? Certainly it suggests that digital magazines are less likely to be opened than their paper sisters (if you believe the readership surveys). I’m not surprised that today print is still the favoured medium. But with the huge cost advantage of digital, I think the figures are pretty respectable. They’ll also be slighly under-reported as pass-on readership will not register as another unique reader.

There are other more important questions: what is the quality of the reader (who is opening them), how is the circulation managed (requested or unrequested circulation) and would these readers read print magazines or is digital the only way to reach them? Frankly there is a big question over whether publishers should be doing more to promote readership of each copy than just sending a single email. In fact digital titles have many uses – Marcus Grimm of NXTBook sent me a great link to a story about how the BBC used digital to drive an increase in print readers.

Digital magazines will also change the behaviour of readers, forcing a more linear approach than print (do you remember the Adams survey some years ago that said the cheap back third of a magazine was almost as well read as the expensive front third?). How many pages do readers view of the digital editions? Is this different from print titles?

Personally I believe that digital magazines are going to be really important in the future. Opening and browsing a digital magazine is a much bigger commitment on the part of the reader than visiting a web page. Digital magazines also deliver news in a push format, highlighting new products and technologies to readers who would be unlikely to learn about them through search engines.

What does the emergence of digital titles mean? Please feel free to post comments and let me know your opinions.

Footnote: please do not imagine this was – in any way – a scientific study. Typically I got just one issue’s stats and I had to completely trust the publishers’ figures.

Embedded World readership study

Mike — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:02:54 +0000

The organisers of Embedded World have released the results of their annual readership study. With the close ties the show has with Weka, it’s probably not surprising that the top three titles are M&T, Elektronik and D&E. Equally unsurprising, Elektronik Praxis follows Weka’s “big three”. But then the results get interesting. The fifth most-read title – according to this survey – is Elektor, and E&E is the third-highest ranking non-Weka title.

What does this all mean? Of course all the recent readership surveys have their limitations, and I could point to a number of different issues with the Embedded World methodology (for example there are several reasons why sample isn’t likely to be representative of the German electronics industry as a whole).But it does still offer us some useful insights: perhaps we weren’t going mad when we put Elektor on some clients’ schedules, and naturally E&E are going to be pleased with such a good result so soon after their relaunch. There is one thing for sure – it guarantees that the German publishing landscape will remain interesting throughout 2009.

AgLa readership survey finally released

Mike — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:00 +0000

After months of talking, the results of the AgLa survey are finally out. This is the study sponsored by E&E, Elektronik Informationen, Elektronik Industrie, Elektronik Praxis and Elektronik Journal to answer the Weka-sponsored La Elfa study.

So who were the winners and losers? Well not surprisingly the raw readership results are less flattering for the three Weka titles than La Elfa, although unsurprisingly even this study still shows M&T as the title with the highest reach. Elektronik Praxis does well, beating Elektronik to have the second-highest reach. Elektronik Industrie is another winner, “beating” D&E. In this study respondents are asked about the pan-European titles, which don’t score well, although EPN gets the highest readership (who says product books are dead!).

So what does this mean? Well like all studies this one isn’t the perfect solution to media planning – like all the others it provides useful information, but also can’t be the perfect answer. Even if the surveys were perfect, we still wouldn’t plan a media schedule by blindly chasing the highest reach (and there should be a special mention for Elektronik Informationen, which was the first title to contact me about the study, and to highlight the positive conclusions you can draw about the title from the study). Why not contact me for a more detailed comparison of the two surveys?